Friday, September 28, 2012

The
Collected Works of John Dowland, performed by The
Consort of Musicke under Anthony Rooley. This was a birthday present last month
from my wife, 12 CDs of heaven for sub-$70. That’s how much she loves me, but
I’m appreciating 12 CDs more than the sub-$70. There are songs (the First Booke of Songs is from 1597; the FourthBooke of Songs is from 1612), keyboard pieces, lute music (and stuff
like that). Singers include Emma Kirkby. Martyn Hill and David Thomas. You can
order the set from Mel at Marbecks here.

Dowland’s music is downbeat but/and as pure
as music can be. It is like high-country stream water without the giardia. It
has been used (or “referenced”) by Benjamin Britten in
his great Nocturnal
of 1964 and, more recently, Harrison
Birtwistle in his equally great “Night’s Black Bird” of 2004. Dowland is
pronounced Doland, hence his Latin title for one piece, “Semper Dowland, semper
dolens” (always Dowland, always doleful).

Which brings us to Mickey
Dolenz. The Monkees’ greatest hits collection Daydream Believer is playing now: the children have been
enthusiastic early adopters of Abba, the Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, Te
Vaka, Nick Cave and Talking Heads, but I fear I have left it too late for the
Monkees.Still, they like this, with
Mickey singing:

He wasn’t a big name in New Zealand –
though he did appear on TV a few times over the years – but former tabloid
editor Derek Jameson, who died on 12 September, was a huge name in Fleet Street.
At the Daily Mirror he invented the
Page Three girl and later, at the Daily
Star, newspaper bingo. A Cockney who never lost his accent, he survived a
terrible, five-to-a-bed childhood to become a committed left-winger and opera
fan. So, an interesting man.

The story goes that when the working-class
Derek Jameson, who has died aged 82, was the newly installed editor of the Daily Express in 1977, the paper’s
patrician managing director, Jocelyn Stevens, bawled him out on the phone
during a morning editorial conference within earshot of Jameson’s own staff.
Jameson put the phone down on him in mid-sentence. In seconds, Stevens was
back, telling James in tones of deadly menace never to put the phone down on
him again. Jameson knew that his staff were wondering what he would do. “Wanna
bet?” he is said to have asked Stevens, and put the phone down again.

Later:

Stevens declared to Jameson on his first day
that he detested all journalists. Jameson cheerfully replied that he had only
been a few hours in the place, but had already discovered that all journalists
similarly detested Stevens.

Monday, September 24, 2012

“Architects are the last people who should
shape our cities,” says Jonathan Meades in the Guardian. Quote unquote:

One cause of this failure is architects’
lack of empathy, their failure to cast themselves as non-architects: architect
Yona Friedman long ago observed that architecture entirely forgets those who
use its products. Another cause of failure is their bent towards aesthetic
totalitarianism – a trait Nikolaus Pevsner approved of, incidentally. There was
no work he admired more than St Catherine's College, Oxford: a perfect piece of
architecture. And it is indeed impressive in an understated way. But it is
equally an example of nothing less than micro-level totalitarianism. Arne
Jacobson designed not only the building, but every piece of furniture and every
item of cutlery.

Tauranga is planning a 150th commemoration
of the Battle
of Gate Pa for 29 April 2014. The man in charge is Buddy
Mikaere, so it will happen and it will be good. He is writing a book about
the battle, hoping to get it published in time for the big day. I grew up there
and have always thought there was a book in it: Buddy is the best possible
person to write it.

A small levy on UK broadband providers – no
more than £2 a month on each subscriber’s bill – could be distributed to news
providers in proportion to their UK online readership. This would solve the
financial problems of quality newspapers, whose readers are not disappearing,
but simply migrating online.

First comment:

A £2-a-month levy on automobiles could save
our horse and cart business.

The most
important book ever written? It is about questions to which the answer is
no, so that is a clever headline. Even more cleverly, the author invites
readers to provide material for the sequel.

And here’s another example:

The “neuroscience” shelves in bookshops are
groaning. But are the works of authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah
Lehrer just self-help books dressed up in a lab coat?

The existence of an order to the same effect
was confirmed by a source from North Pyongan Province, who told Daily NK, “The
order to hand in all CDs containing songs sung by Ri Sol Joo was handed down
right after Kim Jong Eun became a KPA Marshal. They didn’t say why, they just
said ‘It’s an order from the Central Party so just do it.’”

The policy is likely a result of concerns
that knowledge of Ri’s background as a singer might undermine efforts to paint
her as a wife with deep-seated concern for the wellbeing of the North Korean
people.

David Aaronovitch weighs in at The Times on causing offence to Muslims,
and whether we should care. It is behind a paywall but Mick Hartley steals a
chunk of it for you here.
Quote unquote:

The week that Salman Rushdie’s memoir of
the events leading up to the threats on his life and his years “on the run” is
published seems a good time to ask whether we can really carry on like this.
According to many, we cannot discuss Islam, depict it or write about it except
in certain very circumscribed ways without causing mortal offence.

This is despite the fact that it plays a
far bigger role in our lives in countries such as Britain than it did 30 years
ago. And worse, in a world where the mobility of communication outstrips the
mobility of understanding, we are now at hazard of “global Muslim anger” every
time a bongo-brain in a Moosejaw shed uploads an idiocy involving something
Islamic.

I met Salman Rushdie 20 or so years ago in
Auckland, when the fatwa was, as it were, a live issue. We were upstairs in the
Pan-Pacific hotel – maybe the Heritage now, anyway the one on Mayoral Drive by
the police station – and after, ooh, nearly a minute of chatting with him and CK
Stead, which was very pleasant, I realised that I was standing between Rushdie and a very large window. I
made my excuses and sidled away...

Sunday, September 23, 2012

The 57th in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the December 1994 issue. It is an interview with Kim Hill who
then had the morning show on National Radio Monday to Friday, followed by some
passages I transcribed from the show. Topics covered include Naomi Wolf
hyperventilating, “photographs of the royal family bathing topless” – how prescient
– and sitting on Jeffrey Archer’s face.

The intro read:

She wields more influence on what books we
buy and read than anyone at Whitcoulls. More, even, than Quote Unquote. The author reviews and interviews on her popular
morning show on National Radio can make or break a book. With an estimated
222,800 people listening every day, she’s New Zealand’s main source of
information and opinions on writers and books. And with her strong opinions and
readiness to argue the toss with her reviewers, Kim Hill herself seems to have
read every book ever published.

How does she do it? “Bluff,” she tells
Stephen Stratford. “Bluff, bluff and bluff.”

KIM HILL, BOOKSELLER

What
is the selection process of books and authors?

We get a whole lot of titles in precis from
the publishers and weed our way through them, and put in our own ideas as well.
It’s a kind of symbiotic relationship – we don’t always do the books they want,
and we sometimes do books they don’t want us to do.

Who’s
we?

Me and my two producers, Maryanne Ahern and
Heather Church.

Do
you try to get a balance between fiction and nonfiction, New Zealand and
overseas?

The balance sorts itself out. We get a
broad range offered, but if we ask for an author interview it tends to be
nonfiction. That’s because nonfiction tends to be current events that we can
have a discussion about. There’s no policy of balance. For reviews we tend to
do fiction, I’m not sure why. We’re often offered gardening, art and cooking,
but they might fit better into another part of the programme, and they’re
pictorial – which is hard to do on radio.

You
manage to talk intelligently about two books a day. I couldn’t do two a week.
What’s your secret?

Bluff. Bluff, bluff and bluff. I read a lot
and read very fast – not necessarily very effectively. They don’t stay with me:
it’s like swotting for an exam – when it’s over, they go blip and you shove the
next one in. It’s speed reading, or skim reading. I spend two hours a night
preparing for the next day’s programme and then I go to bed and read the book.

The girls here say I don’t need to, that
we’ve got a reviewer to do the book. I get criticised for interrupting the
reviewer, and maybe I do it too often, but I think it makes for a more
interesting dialogue on the book. It can be good if we disagree – we don’t as
often as I thought would happen.

I do have a little trouble with sporting
autobiographies – it’s a foreign language to me.

Your
interview with Jeffrey Archer has become legendary. Did you find him
intimidating?

He was kind of weird. So weird that it was
only afterwards that I thought he was intimidating. At the time I just thought
he was going mad. Someone sent me a poster of him and I put it on a seat so
everyone could sit on his face.

There’s a certain arrogance sometimes with
authors, they may think the point of view I’m expressing in a question is
always mine, or think I shouldn’t ask that question. That irritates me rather
than intimidates me.

Given
the size of your audience, while a good review on your show will obviously lift
sales, a bad review could damage sales, and hence the author’s income. I’m
thinking particularly of local authors - for example, Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s My History, I Think got a drubbing
recently. Do you feel any responsibility in these cases?

If we only reviewed the books we liked, and
only said that we liked each book, that would undermine the credibility of the
book reviews. And it’s that credibility which is responsible for the positive
effect we can have.

Some books should never have been
published, they’re so self-indulgent and inept. I’d probably hate it myself [to
be on the receiving end] because an author puts so much of themselves into a
book.

Has
anyone ever said thank you for the exposure and helping boost their sales?

There
must have been authors who were daunting not because they’re awful, like
Archer, but because their legions of fans will have read every word and know
their work by heart – and you haven’t.

Doris Lessing was the most intimidating, or
at least the prospect of interviewing her was. I was enormously fraught
beforehand. She was very difficult to interview, she’s quite terse and business­like.
She doesn’t expand – some people are lovely and expansive and give you time to
think of the next question.

I really enjoyed talking to Jim Crace, we
rambled around in an amiable fashion.

What
do you read for pleas­ure?

I’m trying to get through E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, but I have to keep
putting it aside for all the books I read for work so it’s taking me an awfully
long time. I did read Postcards when Graham Beattie reviewed it for us and
waxed lyrical. She’s my favourite author at the moment. That’s one of the best
parts of this job. I would never have read Elmore Leonard if not for this job;
now I’ve developed a taste for crime.

You’d
never know it as a listener, but there must have been a few disasters. What
happens if there’s a no-show?

I just carry on with the interview already
underway because I usually want to carry on talking anyway. Or we find
something else – there’s always more ideas than we can use. Today, for example,
there was no book review because the book reviewer got the day wrong.

I’m sometimes disappointed with authors. I
looked forward to Naomi Wolf and we had a terrible time. We didn’t get on, and
she started hyperventilating down the line from America. She took great umbrage
at me asking some of the standard questions – like how did she reconcile The Beauty Myth and Fire With Fire, and where does she stand on feminism – but no, no,
she couldn’t understand how I could ask these questions. And she started
hyperventilating.

Surprisingly often they are. I would assume
they would never be, but so often they are able to talk.

The troublesome thing with many of the
well-known authors is that they’ve answered every question before. You try to
surprise them, but then there’s the danger of being too clever, appearing to be
smart. But you’re not trying to make them happy, you’re trying to make the
listeners happy.

I’d like to interview Robert James Waller,
the author of Bridges Of Madison County,
because I can’t believe how terrible that book is, and how many people have
liked it. I think it’s part of the backlash – a big strong man sweeping the
helpless female into his arms. Maybe we don’t get a chance to indulge our more
primitive instincts. Now they’re making the movie with Clint Eastwood in the
male role, it puts me right off.

What
are your likes and dislikes from your own reading?

I hate
Janette Winterson. She represents a genre of self-indulgent obscurity
masquerading as deep and meaningful literature. It just seems so precious. As
for likes... God help me, I still have a soft spot for Ernest Hemingway. And
Henry James – Portrait of a Lady is
my all-time favourite book. And Jane Austen.

I like Owen Marshall very much, he’s a
clever writer, Maurice Gee – though it’s boring to say so, everyone says that.
I really liked Shonagh Koea’s latest book, Sing
To Me, Dreamer, which I’m happy about because I wanted to like her but
couldn’t quite. Now I’ll go back to the earlier ones.

Selected
highlights from three days of Kim Hill in November.

Kim
Hill: Nancy
Tich­borne’s Flowers is a record of her watercolours and she joins me now.
Good morning.

Nancy
Tichborne: Hello.

KH: I’ve just been talking to you about storm damage. There are
gardens all over this country weeping into their aspidistras as we speak.

NT: It’s tragic.

KH: How did you go from fashion design to gardening and landscape
designing?

NT: Well, it’s all visual. If you’re interested in the visual world
you probably could take on a lot of design problems. The whole time you’ve got
to be looking, being very very observant and I’m quite sure half the people on
the plane didn’t see what I saw looking out of the window – there was
ultramarine blue and cerulean blue and then raw umber spilling forth out of the
mouths of these rivers I was looking down on.

KH: I feel a painting coming on.

Kim
Hill: The book’s called Diana: Her New Life, but it’s not, is it? It’s a sort of a dreadful
kind of embattled existence.

Andrew
Morton: It’s certainly a lonely existence, an
unhappy existence, an existence where she’s trying to make sense of her present
life, trying to learn from the mistakes of the past and trying to make some
sense of the future... She has, despite all the clouds which have surrounded
her over the last years, some vision, some little sunlight of what she aims to
do in the future.

KH: She’s an odd mixture, though, isn’t she, Andrew? I mean, kind of a
mixture between Mother Theresa and Madonna, I suppose. She does all this
charitable work,

she is keenly interested and touched by
humanity, but at the same time, as you report in your book, she has an
obsession with, shall we say, fringe therapies and she spends megabucks on
fringe appearance-­enhancers.

AM: Yes she does. This is one of the things that makes Diana such a
fascinating character because she is a mixture of contradictions.

KH: You’re probably wary of trying to justify what appears to be a
rather prurient interest, not only on your part of course, but on our part, on
the whole world’s part, into the personal lives of Charles and Diana and the
rest of them. Why should we know all this stuff? Why can’t they just get on
with their lives. Why is it our business? AM:
[They are] a part of the Western weave of our social and cultural lives, they
occupy a mythic place in our imaginations... We will continue to be fascinated
by them, and especially by the, you know, dramatic tension in this
relationship. At the moment we see the Princess of Wales trying to struggle and
carve a new life for herself, and the Prince of Wales trying to re-establish
himself. It is an unfolding and fascinating drama.

KH: Is there a difference between writing about it and hiding behind a
bush and taking photographs of the royal family bathing topless or whatever?

AM: There’s a huge difference between interviewing people on the
record or off the record who are demonstrably close to the Princess of Wales.

Kim
Hill: A British television documentary has
questioned the worth of Mother Teresa’s charity work in India. The programme
apparently accuses her of having a penchant for the rich and powerful no matter
how corrupt...

Laurie
Margolis: It is the total antithesis of any image
that one has ever had of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

KH: Which is sort of standard iconoclastic work, I suppose. It calls
her Hell’s Angel, doesn’t it?

LM: There’s one rather extraordinary story which it claims is the way
she became known as this almost saintly figure. It says that a well-known
British figure called Malcolm Muggeridge who died some years ago, a
larger-than-life television personality and a prominent Roman Catholic, went to
make a film about her when she was just a nun running an orphan’s home in
Calcutta. A lot of the stuff that was shot in rather dark rooms was rather well-lit,
almost had a glow to it, and Muggeridge decided almost immediately that this
was a divine light, that it was a miracle, and therefore the myth of Mother
Teresa started, according to the programme.

They had the cameraman on, and he says far
from it being a miracle it was simply that the BBC had just taken delivery of
some new stock from Kodak and it was particularly good in low light conditions.

KH (laughing): Laurie, thank you for your time this morning. No doubt
the fallout from that programme will continue – and no, Virginia, nothing is
sacred.

Kim
Hill: Is this a good book?

Grant
Nisbett: It’s a very interesting book, it’s a book
about the most controversial, talked-­about, accident-prone, incident-prone
cricketer of all time. What strikes me most, Kim, is the honesty of the guy.
Ian Botham of course is a regular Jekyll and Hyde... Early on in the book he
describes, or his mates describe him as Bungalow which means, or their,
interpretation of that means nothing upstairs and that perhaps is quite apt for
Ian Botham.

KH: What, you mean cos he’s thick? Is he being honest, though, when he
says that yes, he indulged in the odd beer, and yes, he had the occasional
joint but he was really character assassinated by the media who would, you
know, jump on a waitress who happened to serve him and say did he ask you for
sex, did he ask you for drugs? Was he, you know, an innocent boy caught up in
the big time?

GN: No, I don’t think so and I think there’s a little
bit more to the guy than that. As I say, I think it is an honest book and he
does concede that he did certainly take drugs and was involved in some
unsavoury incidents off the field, but generally speaking he touches on all
these. But the media does cop a fair bit of criticism and he hasn’t got too many
mates in the media. In fact, one of the underlying themes in the book is that
he hasn’t got too many mates full stop. Those he has he’s very loyal to –
fellows like Vivien Richards, Bob Willis. But my word, he’s got a long list of
enemies and they’re listed as well.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

You remember the story
of the well-meaning woman in Spain, Cecilia Giminez, an octogenarian who tried
to restore a fresco at the Sanctuario de Misericordia and basically obliterated
it. The fresco was 19th-century so was hardly a Giotto or Piero della
Francesco, let alone a Fra Angelico. But vandalism, however well-intentioned,
is vandalism. Here is the fresco before and after she got to work on it:

Terrible. But – the vandalised version
looks like a Patricia France. This, for example,is In
the Deep South (1991):

Patricia France was a New Zealand painter,
born in Stratford (1911), raised in Auckland, trained in Paris and died in
Dunedin (1995). We became friends after I included her in a calendar of NZ
paintings I put together in 1988 or so. I visited her every time I went to Dunedin:
she was an old lady by then but wonderful company, her house
was full of great paintings by McCahon, Jeffrey Harris and others, and she was
madly generous – she gave me two paintings and I know she gave many away to
other friends and admirers. I could guess bits of her history, and she told me
a lot, but I didn’t know the full story until I read the excellent
book about her, Painting Out the Past
by Richard Donald (Longacre, 2008) and watched the equally excellent 35-minute
video profile/interview with her by Brian Turner (University of Otago, 1994).

As they say on Seven Days,
this is my picture: Separate Creatures (1984), which I bought that year from Patricia’s first Auckland exhibition at
Denis Cohn Gallery:

The really early stuff could be violent (e.g. Hanging My Father) but while the later
paintings are all pretty, if you look carefully and long you see a lot of
anger. An uncomfortable beauty. But if her sadness went into her paintings of
people, her joy went into her paintings of flowers. They are radiant.

Topics: the Film Commission (Chad,
Jonathan); the Frankfurt Book Fair (Chad, me); how our e-books are selling
(Chad, Chris); the point of e-books (all of us); the state of our friends’ PhDs
(Paul, me); praise for Kelly Ana Morey (Paul) who was the most disruptive
student one of us had ever had (me); how hard it is to be a freelancer with the
spikes and dips in income, mostly dips (seven of us); how the man on the land
has never been the typical New Zealander because this has always been an
urbanised society (all of us, led by Jonathan); and at the end it was me and
Peter talking about bookshelves.

It was striking that here were eight middle-aged
men – educated, professional even if only media/arts – and just one of us has a
steady job. Then again, he works for Fairfax so will have a Plan B. And because
he is smart, Plans C, D and E.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

It’s a shame this isn’t “essentially a
literary gossip column” – you can’t believe everything CK
Stead says – because if it was I’d have a ton of material for you. But at
least Chad Taylor and I
won’t run out of things to talk about when we catch up later this week.

In less than two years, I'll probably be
creating and selling my own ebooks via this blog and my author site, or via
some similar online mechanism. The notion is empowering but more than a little
melancholy. Writing is already a lonely business: when the publishing model
changes, it will become even lonelier.

And that is exactly what has happened. This
morning, alerted by his blog, I bought a copy of his short story Supercollider.
On Amazon, $0.99. Bargain. I don’t have a Kindle but can read e-books on my PC.
Chad bills his story as “weird, offensive”. We’ll see.

Joan Brady, whose fine novel Theory of Warwon the 1993 Whitbread Book
of the Year and£21,000 in prize money,
has belatedly realised that the money was tainted. Whitbread was a multinational. Evil, evil, evil. It gets
worse: Whitbread, “a corporate giant”, has bought Costa, a coffee chain
that is opening outlets in “small towns and villages”. The book award is now
known as the Costa. And you know what?:

The worst part of it is that
Whitbread/Costa isn’t the only commercially funded literary prize.

Shocking. Are there no depths to which these
dastardly capitalists will not sink? Giving money to writers is wrong (unless
it is done by the state). Though I don’t suppose Ms Brady intends to give any
of her £21,000 back. David Thompson points
out that Brady’s brand-new novel The
Blue Death, the Observer’s Thriller of the Month, is published by Simon
& Schuster, which is owned by CBS, a corporate giant. I have ascertained
that it is available on Amazon, another corporate giant. Here in New Zealand we
can comfort ourselves with the thought that while the Wattie and Montana book
awards must have been bad, the NZ Post awards must be good.

Speaking of intelligent, educated idiots
(via Toby
Manhire) Germaine Greer has done it again. In 1972 she was arrested for
saying “bullshit” in Auckland. She is still talking bullshit. The Courier Mailreports:

In her opening speech at the 50th BWF
[Brisbane Writers Festival] last night, Greer told more than 250 people […]
that almost half of all Queenslanders have low literacy levels.

“The ABS reports that 47 per cent of
Queenslanders can not read a newspaper, follow a recipe, make sense of time
tables or understand instructions on a medicine bottle,” Greer said.

“You can not have a good time at literary
festival when that is the underlying bedrock truth.”

Hardly surprising that an arts graduate
would get into trouble for misreading and/or misquoting
statistics:

State Library of Queensland public and
indigenous library services director Jane Cowell aid yesterday that Greer had
misrepresented the statistics, which came from the 2006 Australian Bureau of
Statistics Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey.

“It’s not 47 per cent of Queenslanders
can’t read a newspaper or a medicine bottle but 14.7 per cent and another 32
per cent struggle with complex things like lease documents, tax advice and
Centrelink forms,” Ms Cowell said.

“Making derogatory comments doesn’t help
this situation because it’s the shame that’s attached to the issue that stops
people from learning.”

Greer sounds the literary festival guest
from hell:

Greer also criticised the BWF, saying the
program was monoglot and “worthy” rather than fun and should not include school
children because it was the responsibility of schools to teach literacy.

She also said including aspiring writers
was also problematic. The problem with creating more writers is that writers
need readers...and one of the traps that lies in wait here is vanity
publishing,” she said.

Right. Don’t encourage writers.

Greer also criticised BWF for featuring
Brisbane writers in the past.

God forbid a regional festival should
support people from the region. What we want is expatriates. Such as, perhaps,
Germaine Greer.

Les
Murray, who was also at the festival (a top bloke: I was his minder one
night at the Auckland Writers Festival, knew he was vastly brainy but not that
he was so funny), was not impressed:

Murray, one of Australia’s and the world’s
leading poets, arrived in Brisbane yesterday to take part in the BWF and said
Greer “would say anything to get a headline”.

“I would not turn aside from a good
urination to listen to Germaine Greer,” he said.

The most tragic thing in all this?:

BWF director Jane O’Hara said she had no
regrets in inviting Greer to open the 50th annual event because she provoked
debate.

“I invited her to speak knowing she would
be provocative,” Ms O’Hara said yesterday.

The Fellowship is an initiative of
the Winn-Manson Menton Trust and is administered by Creative New Zealand. The
Trust gratefully acknowledges a $25,000 grant from the New Zealand/France Friendship
Fund towards the residency.

The unofficial news is that you can
download a PDF of the application form here.
Full details on eligibility, and what the selection panel are looking for, is here. If you need more
information, the person to ask is Marlene LeCren at Creative
NZ.

My impression from talking to
friends who have had the fellowship is that while the money is great,
accommodation can be an issue and working in the Villa Isola Bella is hard (here
is a great* piece Nigel Cox wrote about it for Sport) – but it is a wonderful opportunity to live and work in the
South of France. The Mansfield connection is nice and a room of one’s own is
always good, but for me the best thing would be that Menton is a short drive
fromItaly.

* Younger readers may be baffled by this bit in Nigel’s essay:

There’s no phone calls, no visitors, no
interruptions, so you get on with it (how’s that, Mr McLauchlan?).

A footnote explains:

When Gordon McLauchlan’s attack on state
patronage to writers was published in the NZ
Herald at least half a dozen ‘friends’ instantly thought of me and sent a
copy. For two weeks afterwards I worked in a fury of self-justifying
indignation.

Few will remember McLauchlan’s “attack on
state patronage to writers” but I do. If memory serves it was on the front page
of the feature section of the Saturday Herald on 23 March 1991. It was as wrong-headed as anything I have ever read in the Herald, which is saying something. There
is a reasonable case to be made against state funding of the arts, but that
wasn’t it. By 1994 McLauchlan was president of the NZ Society of Authors, an
organisation very keen on state
funding of the arts, and he became an
energetic, useful proponent. I wonder what happened.

Blog comment of the day, on this silly column by George Monbiot which contains the sentence “But if ever there
was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is.”:

There rarely is a valid case for the
precautionary principle. Had the pernicious concept been around earlier in
history, we would never have left the trees.

Want to see Julian Assange putting on the
moves? You
can! He has complained that showing this clip is an invasion of privacy. Seriously.

Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina has received a decliner from every reviewer I have read.
When she spoke at the Auckland Writers’ Festival in 2001 I thought she was a
narcissistic idiot and it seems many people now share my view, even the Guardian and New Statesman. Here,
for example, is Laurie Penny in the latter. Quote unquote:

Then there’s the sudden five-page diversion
to a women's rape shelter in Sierra Leone, plonked weirdly in the middle of the
book like a vitamin pill on top of a cupcake. The women and men Wolf meets
here, on a trip for western reporters organised in 2004, are not substantive
figures in the book – she spends far longer interviewing a
banker-turned-tantric-healer who specialises in massaging women to orgasm with
special oils, flowers and incantations to welcome their inner goddess to a
really great wank. The women in Sierra Leone feel like an afterthought, as they
do in so many contemporary pseudo-feminist tracts, but they must be mentioned,
even if that mention only draws into sharper focus the fact that the book’s
field of vision rarely leaves upper Manhattan.

It’s always good to hear an arts graduate –
especially an MA (Hons) in political science – on economics and real science.
Former Green Party MP Sue Kedgley presents
a novel concept of private property and argues for expensive food. I’d like to
see her explain the former to a farmer – it is “our farmland”, apparently, not
theirs – and the latter to anyone from Africa, India or China. Let the starving
millions eat organic! It’s better for them.

Which
country had the best athlete-to-medal ratios at the Paralympics and
Olympics? A clue: it wasn’t China, not even Belarus.

The
NZ bestseller list: I know I bang on about it, but the latest list has
Nicky Pellegrino’s When in Rome at #8
– on the international fiction list, because the book was first published
overseas. It was the same for Emily Perkins’s The Forrests. If Nicky was on the NZ fiction list she would be #1.
Emily would probably be #2. I’m pleased for Brian Turner that he is rated as #1
on NZ fiction for Elemental– has a poetry book ever
been #1 before? – but
Nicky’s novel is selling vastly better. The bestseller list is very misleading,
and it is high time that it included books by local authors who are lucky and
talented enough to be published overseas. Nicky and Emily both live here; readers
here buy their books. It is absurd that they are not counted as NZ bestsellers when they so clearly are.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Regular readers will know that I am a
regular freeloader at the Wintec Press Club lunches. This year’s host is Steve
Braunias (his brilliant new book, Civilisation:20
Places on the Edge of the World, will be in shops in time for Christmas
present-buying) who last time invited Winston Peters as speaker. As Murray
Mexted would say, that performance was egregious: my award-winning
report is here.
This time Steve redeemed himself by inviting as speaker a serious person, Greg
King, the criminal defence lawyer who earlier this year defended Ewen McDonald
who was accused of murdering his brother-in-law Scott Guy in Feilding.

The idea of these lunches is that media
veterans talk informally – alcohol is served – to the students from Wintec’s
media course, where Steve is Editor in Residence, and I make a point every time
of disabusing at least two students of any idea they have that journalism is a
sensible career choice. Too late for the two young women I spoke to: one is
already working at a good provincial newspaper and knows exactly where she
wants to go next; the other will graduate soon and is going to apply for the
same job. Sounded awful to me – in a part of the Waikato where there is a lot of
unemployment, teenage car crashes and nasty cases of child abuse. But both were
smart as anything, positive about the industry, and will be successful. And
then, because they are smart as anything, they will go into PR.

I was seated next to David Slack the Metro wit who is from near Feilding
(Kiwitea), as is my wife (Halcombe), so we and our families all had a keen interest
in the Scott Guy case – as did the rest of the country. Apart from David and
me, and my old friend David Cohen who was also at our table, it was a
glittering crowd. Guests included Dame Malvina Major (shoes: red slingbacks),
Sarah Ulmer (shoes: sensible black low heels), Charlotte Grimshaw (shoes: sadly not
visible from my seat), Marcus Lush, Sir Patrick Hogan, Garth McVicar, Te Radar,
and a bunch of journalists and editors from the Waikato, Auckland and even
Wellington.

King was superb. He spoke for 20 or 30 minutes
without notes. He was smart, funny, and focused on useful material for the
students. He told a true-crime story that was the single most distressing story
I have ever heard. People were in tears; I tried to tell my wife about it that
night and couldn’t get the words out. This wasn’t murder porn – his point was
that murders of brown people go unreported, even such a shocking one as this,
but there is a huge media appetite for murder stories about attractive young
white people. He was also very good on how TV especially presents a distorted
version of how a trial happens. He gave chapter and verse – photos and clips of
the accused from one part of the trial shown with a voice-over about a
completely different part. Previous speakers I have seen at these lunches have
been mainly politicians or media types, who have their place (apart from Winston
Peters), but this was someone who knew what he was talking about and was very
clear about how damaging the media can be in its selection of what it does
and doesn’t present to the public. It was chastening.

Fashion
week has been and gone but we still have the HoS to remind us. A good piece by Chloe Johnson takes us back to
the glory days of Judith Baragwanath and Stephanie Overton in the 1970s. Both
are pictured above: Overton on the left and Baragwanath on the right. Typical Herald: the photographer is not credited
but the picture researcher is. The story was headlined “Kiwi model’s journey
from wool to writing”. Baffingly, APN has not seen fit to put it online, so here
it is. The intro was:

Photo recall: The life of a fashion model
is generally nasty, brutish and short. Judith Baragwanath, who first modelled
for Vogue as a 15-year-old, was one of the few to transcend that and become a
style icon.

And the story was:

They called it pure virgin wool, and these
two young models helped make it all the rage in the 1970s. Stephanie Overton
(left) and Judith Seay (now Judith Barag­wanath) were just teenagers when they
posed for the New Zealand Wool Board’s fashion shoot, dressed in check coat
dress and mini skirt made from virgin wool, with pantyhose and white Daisy Duck
clodhoppers. Virgin wool is simply wool spun for the first time, rather than
recycled wool.

Baragwanath says the shoot was done at
fashion photographer Desmond Williams’ studio to demonstrate how products pro­gressed
from the sheep’s back to final garments.

“It would have been a full eight-hour shoot
with dozens of clothes and, if we were lucky, someone would have done our hair
pro­fessionally,” Baragwanath says.

She says Williams did their makeup, which
was unusual for a photographer. “He liked to create an air of rivalry between
models,” she recalls. “His thinking was a competitive atmosphere would bring
the best out in us. Our thinking was, ‘oh, for God’s sake, grow up’.”

Baragwanath began modelling at 15 for the
New Zealand edition of Vogue, but
moved into journalism in the 70s where she became a fashion writer and the
gossip columnist behind Felicity Ferret at Metro
magazine.

The model-turned-journalist has always been
the black sheep of the fashion family, opting for leather over wool in the 70s.
“I had leather bell bottoms which had a tendency to stretch over time. I’d keep
them tight in all the right places by stitching the seams with fishing tackle.

“If you knew the right places to go, there
were Victorian nighties galore which looked great worn with black stockings and
vintage fur coats with high, padded shoulders. I’ve still got them.”

In the 1980s, she donned black lipstick and
men’s clothes – becoming known as “Black Lips”.

She calls today’s fashions “ghastly”. Yet
she was rediscovered when Kate Sylvester used Bara­gwanath’s style as the
inspiration for her 2009 Fashion Week collec­tion “Diamond Dogs”.

Baragwanath didn’t turn up to the Sylvester
catwalk show then, and she’s not much interested in Fashion Week now. Now in
her 60s, she confesses fashion and designs today “don’t do a thing for me”.

“I tend to agree with Oscar Wilde who said:
‘Fashion is so ghastly it needs to be changed every six months’.”

Judith is a national treasure, still beautiful
and one of the wittiest people I know, but I’d love to have heard from
Stephanie Overton too. Her subsequent life was a bit different from Judith’s.

UPDATE:

When I went to the children’s school this
morning a ferret ran across the road in front of me. Spooky or what?

Saturday, September 8, 2012

To Auckland on Thursday for meetings with
authors, booksellers and publishers.

1. First appointment was at noon for a
long, long lunch with poets (Kevin Ireland, Peter Bland, Bernard Brown), Buddle
Findlay Sargeson fellows (Anna Taylor, Karyn Hay, Mark Broatch), a
journalist (Rob O’Neill) and a Buddle
Findlay partner (Michael Dineen). Michael was an investor in Quote Unquote the magazine so is
officially awesome.

There was gossip, and wine.

2. Second appointment was at 4:30 upstairs
at DeBrett’s with Whitcoulls and the Book Publishers’ Association.

There was gossip, and martinis.

3. Third appointment was at 5:30 at the
Concert Chamber, one of my favourite Auckland rooms, for the CLNZ awards. There are
two of $35,000 given every year to writers of serious non-fiction projects. The
five finalists (as blogged previously here)
spoke briefly about their projects – all sounded very strong and publishable –
with Finlay Macdonald chairing (superb, obviously) and then the winners were announced: David
Veart, author of First Catch Your Weka: A
Story of New Zealand Cooking (AUP, 2008) and Digging up the Past: Archaeology for the Young and Curious (AUP,
2011), who will write about toys, and Hazel Petrie, author of Chiefs of Industry: Maori Tribal Enterprise
in Early Colonial New Zealand (AUP, 2006), who will write about Maori
slavery. It was as good an awards event as I have been to.

There was gossip, and wine.

4. Fourth appointment was at 8:30 in the
Japanese restaurant practically next door with three of the four judges, most
of the board of CLNZ (two of the three publishers and all three of the
authors), our CEO and a smattering of spouses.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Waikato
Times’s weekend magazine runs books reviews and comment from – I’m
guessing, as Fairfax moves in mysterious ways – newspapers around the country.
Usually we get Philip Matthews’ column of Book News from the Press, which is a good thing.
Yesterday’s column had this item:

Actors who write fiction – that would be a
very short list (Ethan Hawke, anyone?). So we’re impressed by the good reviews
that Molly Ringwald is attracting for her first novel, When It Happens to You. Younger readers should know that Ringwald
was a big movie star back in the 1980s.

Not a “very short” list, really. Off the
top of my head I can think of Dirk Bogarde, Carol Drinkwater, Stephen Fry,
Steve Martin, Barbara Ewing, Carrie Fisher, Robert Shaw, Julian Fellowes, Judy
Cornwell and Richard E Grant. Emily Perkins
started out as an actress; NZ actors Michael Galvin and Peter Feeney both had
short stories published in 2000 in Boys’
Own Stories, a collection edited by Graeme Lay.

There must be loads more. Does crime novelist Mark
Billingham count? He is/was a stand-up comedian rather than a straight actor,
but that’s close enough for me. Even William Shatner has published novels – but
does he count he an actor?